


Girl on a Swing, Pitt Street, New York

by deniigiq



Series: Lighter Fluid Verse [8]
Category: Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Field Trip, Gen, Inspiration, It is not what you are expecting tho, Jewish Character, Peter Parker's Field Trip to Stark Industries, Photography, Team Red, This is my take on a Peter Parker takes a Field Trip to Stark Industries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:15:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24811426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: He looked up and rested his cheek on his palm while Mrs. Baird told everyone to quiet down so that she could speak. She started in on explaining over the remaining murmurs that this wasn’t a joyride they were going on; it was a trip for education.Peter extricated his notebook from under his textbook and set it on top of the slip.He wasn’t going.(Peter goes on a field trip. But not one he expects.)
Relationships: May Parker (Spider-Man) & Peter Parker, Peter Parker & His Heritage
Series: Lighter Fluid Verse [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1523357
Comments: 45
Kudos: 1007





	Girl on a Swing, Pitt Street, New York

**Author's Note:**

> So an ask on tumblr got me thinking about tropes in the Spiderman fandom that I have never written and one of them, I realized is Peter Parker's field trip to Stark Industries. 
> 
> I have a very difficult and complicated relationship with this trope. So I decided that fuck it, I'm going to write a field trip fic that I could have an easier time reading. And that is this. 
> 
> This takes place when Peter is 17, post **To whom it may concern** in the **Dumpster Fires Verse**. I would recommend that you read that one for the context for this piece, but if you choose not to, then you need to know that Peter has left Stark Industries and his 'internship' at this point. 
> 
> Please note that there is a single reference in this piece to the Holocaust, in addition to some discussion of hiding injuries from view. Please do what you need to to keep yourselves safe.

He took a permission slip from the stack being passed around the room and set it down in front of him while everyone else chattered.

It asked for his name, May’s name, her signature, and a date. There was a brief block of text outlining the trip and its purpose and Peter felt listless just glancing through it.

His limbs were heavy.

He looked up and rested his cheek on his palm while Mrs. Baird told everyone to quiet down so that she could speak. She started in on explaining over the remaining murmurs that this wasn’t a joyride they were going on; it was a trip for _education_.

Peter extricated his notebook from under his textbook and set it on top of the slip.

He wasn’t going.

May came into his room the next night and sat down on the edge of his bed while he gnawed on the back of his mechanical pencil, trying to work backwards from a physics solution towards where he’d gone wrong.

She said that Ned had mentioned a class field trip on the way out of the apartment. She pointed out that Peter hadn’t mentioned one to her lately.

Peter told her that that was because he wasn’t going on a field trip. Not to Stark Industries, anyways.

Ned was. MJ was. And that was good for them.

But he wasn’t, so there was no need for any conversation around the issue at all.

“Does it make you uncomfortable?” May asked him.

Yeah. It fucking did, actually.

May nodded.

“Then you won’t go,” she said. “But next time, tell me so I know where you’ll be, okay?”

Okay.

“Anyways, playing hooky is an important part of the highschool experience. When is this thing? Next Friday?”

…yes?

“Great, I’ve got the day off. Let’s go do something fun.”

Peter slowed his pencil gnawing. May kept her eyes on him, stood in the doorway with a smirk and a hand on her hip.

That was bait. Peter could see that bait. It looked like a road cone.

“What kind of fun?” he asked suspiciously.

Wade told him to only take the bait when he had a back-up plan for how to swerve around the box that was held up over it with a stick. Matt told him to take the bait only if he was hungry and stupid.

Peter was hungry and stupid a lot these days.

“You know, fun,” May repeated.

That is unhelpful, parental unit. More specificity is required to complete this request.

“ _Fun_ ,” May insisted. “Night, now. Don’t stay up too late. Clear your schedule for next Friday—and that includes school.”

She shut the door and left Peter sitting in yellow lamplight, still trying to figure out what the hell ‘fun’ meant.

He put a dent in the pencil.

“You’re not going?” MJ said the next day at lunch.

“Why should I?” he asked.

She and Ned fell into uncomfortable silence.

“We can not-go with you?” Ned offered.

No, that was too obvious. If the three of them were missing at the same time, it would be clear as day that they were all together and all playing hooky.

“May’s taking the day off,” Peter said. “Apparently we’re going to go do something ‘fun.’”

“What kind of fun?” MJ asked.

“A May’s-Secret kind of fun,” Peter said. “She won’t tell me, but she’s got an idea, I know she does.”

MJ twisted a few strands of hair back and forth between the pads of her fingers. She’d dyed the tips fire-engine red. They suited her.

“I can do a mourning wail for you on Stark’s lobby floor?” she offered.

Peter laughed, but no, no. That was unnecessary. His beef with the big guy didn’t have to have so much gravity as to suck other people into it. That was kind of selfish.

“It’ll be really good,” MJ promised. “Ned can do one too and we’ll say we’re mourning all the victims of atrocities committed by the company.”

Peter hummed.

“Tempting,” he said. “But I’m gonna pass. I just don’t want to be there, that’s all.”

The other two sighed and then shrugged.

“Don’t post anything on Instagram,” Ned said. “Then they’ll know you faked sick.”

Saying that he was too good of a student to have faked sick before was a lie. Peter was by far not that good of a student anymore. He was late all the time these days and his grades went up and down like a rollercoaster. He was more than aware that the teachers were whispering about him and all his colorful bandaids and bruises.

Wade told him that he had to make them look intentional to get away with it.

Matt told him that he needed a prop to wave peoples’ way when they started making mumblings in the direction of calling CPS.

When he was finished dragging Peter’s ass across the gym in patterns only the ancient Boxing Gods understood, he flung Peter down and told Wade that it was time. He stood over Peter as he collected himself and soon enough Wade arrived back inside with a box covered with enough glitter to suffocate a horse.

Wade explained that Ellie had volunteered to make the wrapping paper.

Inside was a skateboard.

A prop.

An excuse.

Matt told him he had a week to become competent and exactly two days to transform himself into a skater kid.

The first couple of starts with the skateboard had given him enough scrapes and bruises that it only took a day for Peter to fully understand why Matt had selected this prop for him among an ocean of them.

But that aside, skateboarding was way harder than people made it look.

Foggy, of all people, showed Peter the ropes. He told him that him and his neighbor had decided at 10 years old that they were going to become skater boys and they’d actually managed to keep that up until about 15, when they’d discovered pot and crushes and a whole world outside of skate shoes and alarming pedestrians. He still knew more or less how to stay on the board.

He told Peter that he could not, despite the very good logic behind it, sticky-feet himself to the board. That was asking for trouble.

He then told Peter that what he really needed to make this happen was a very patient and encouraging friend.

That was MJ out on two bases and Ned out on the ‘patient’ one. Ned thought skateboards and their riders were inconsiderate dude-bros with no respect for other people. He wouldn’t tolerate Peter becoming one on his watch, so that left a new option that Peter hadn’t had until a few weeks back.

Johnny.

Johnny was kind of famous, so Peter was surprised to find out that he wasn’t half as obnoxious as he came off in his blue and black suit.

He responded to Peter’s text almost immediately with an ‘OMG!!! CAN I TOUCH IT???’

Johnny didn’t know how to ride a skateboard.

Johnny was really, really _bad_ at riding a skateboard.

His sister came outside after a while of Peter and Johnny taking turns eating shit on the sidewalk and showed them how it was done. She told Johnny to embarrass her again upon pain of death and then went back inside.

Johnny told Peter that he had to learn now or suffer the consequences, so what they needed was a brief interlude into physics.

A few Youtube videos later and a mutual reminder to each other that they were both mutated, intelligent, and reckless human beings made the next few falls easier somehow.

The ones after that were even easier.

Johnny throwing his hands up and cheering as Peter crossed their 50 yard marker without loosing his footing helped loads.

Foggy was right.

The friend was the key ingredient for success here.

The skateboard covered up the scratches and bruises better than any bandaid. Peter took it with him everywhere. Ned did not approve. MJ wanted to steal it. Principal Morita stalked the halls, telling Peter that those wheels better not touch the ground on campus.

And it was good.

And it was handy.

And it covered up the muscles growing in Peter’s thighs. The baggy shirts covered the ones in his biceps.

He knew he looked scruffier than ever these days. No more collared shirts. No more crew necked sweaters. He cut the collars off those to widen the necks a bit. May had taught him how to throw Ben’s old flannels over plain t-shirts and how to cuff them so they didn’t fall off his hands.

His right shoe sole was ground down to softness.

It felt right.

It felt _good_.

Johnny told him he looked cool. And they were friends now, so that meant something.

Friday rolled around and Peter shut off his alarm and was halfway to the bathroom to scrub his face in the sink before he remembered that he wasn’t going to school.

May sipped coffee in the kitchen and caught him when he tried to sneak a Monster out of the fridge.

She would not hear any excuses about Spiderman requiring extra energy. She was of the opinion that if Spiderman went to bed an hour earlier than he had that night, he wouldn’t need it so strongly. She said he could have coffee.

So he had coffee.

What’s a guy to do, huh?

He sat at the table while she called in for him at school and said that he wouldn’t be there and, that done, she sat down across from him and asked him who the best aunt in the world was.

It was her.

Obviously.

This was the right answer. She told him to go clean up. They were going to the museum.

The Jewish Museum was having an exhibit on interwar photography and Peter could have cried. He settled for throwing his arms around May’s neck while she patted at him and told him she’d thought he’d be excited about it and it was a good thing that he’d brought along Ben in his old orange flannel—he’d always loved the Jewish Museum.

Peter had been there a few times as a little kid for various holidays events. There had been a menorah lighting there once when he’d been really little and he remembered sitting in Ben’s arms, mesmerized by the light and the prayers all around him.

Ben had been the kind of guy who went through life, throwing around ‘mensch’es and ‘schlep’s and ‘meshuggeneh’s.

He’d been proud of his heritage, if not overly religious. He’d tried to get Peter to adopt similar speech patterns when Peter had been much younger (‘What do we call that kind of guy, Pete?’ ‘A putz.’ “A _putz_ , that’s damn right.’) but the kids at school hadn’t really understood what Peter was talking about when he’d said those things, so Peter had left the words on the doorstep, to be picked up when he came home.

Ben said that that was fine, sometimes you had to stoop a little bit, but that didn’t mean you had to bow.

Peter wished that the words Ben had taught him felt more at home in his mouth now.

The halls were white and most of the images were small scenes of everyday life around the city from the late 1910s to the late 1930s. People in them wore hats. Buildings seemed vast and clean. Lines were heavy. Iron bars and shadowed, concrete shapes danced through the images like they were in a hurry to get on the scene—as if they were scared a pallet of wood might come in and try to set up shop first.

Peter wanted to touch those heavy blocks of darkness.

They looked like how fire escapes felt at night. Those bars etching lines across the city and the sky, reminders of loneliness and isolation, but spaces of community.

Peter wanted to do a series of fire escape photographs.

May told him that was a great idea.

There was a photograph in one of the rooms which had once been small but which had been blow up huge until its subject was life-sized.

Peter couldn’t reach her, though.

She swung high over his head with her knees bent, standing on the seat of a swing, nearly horizontal with the ground. Her barred in playground was guarded by the towering mouth of an arch with bricks all around it, set on either side neatly like impossibly straight teeth. The swingset’s stark gray frame threw the girl in her white dress up into the white sky visible on each side of the Williamsburg Bridge.

Peter knew what that felt like.

That girl, suspended in the air above him, at the crest of her swing—he knew _exactly_ what that felt like.

He’d swung by that bridge. He swung by it still. The park wasn’t there anymore, but the feeling of soaring was. At least for Peter it was, anyways.

“I feel this one,” he told May, unable to take his eyes away from it.

May joined him in looking up at the girl.

“Do you?” she asked.

“I _feel_ it,” Peter insisted.

When he brought his chin down, he found May smiling at him.

“Well, I guess we’ll have to see if they’ve got a copy in the shop,” she said.

The rest of the pictures were good—great, even. Amazing. Old New York would always be captivating. The idea of standing and walking and swinging where these other people had once stood, walked, and swung would never not be moving in some deep, emotional kind of way.

They triggered this feeling of longing deep in Peter’s core and he didn’t know how to explain it beyond these surface-level, sprawling notes of nostalgia and craving.

But the picture of the swinging girl made him tear the periodic table of elements off his wall. He kept the poster. It was a useful poster in some ways, but mostly, he’d put it up because it had been science-y and that was the kind of thing that scientists had in their rooms and offices and whatnot.

This, though.

This was something different.

He felt this one.

It looked a little funny next to all the other things he had tacked up there, but that wasn’t the point.

The point was that that girl, nearly a hundred years ago, had been caught in the surge and the fall that Peter longed for, day after day.

She didn’t need a skateboard to cover her bruises. She didn’t need to justify herself to anyone. In fact, she didn’t need anyone else in that moment to boost her up high.

She’d done it on her own.

She was flying and Peter flew with her and he was proud of her and all those iron bars and bricks around her.

May told him that he could take pictures like that one. He could make another series. A tribute to Walter Rosenblum, the man who’d taken that picture.

The man who’d documented the horrors of the concentration camp at Dachau.

The Jewish man who’d captured instances--bare seconds--of heart and soul and triumph in the iron and bricks and gravel of everyday life in New York City.

Peter could be like him.

Peter _would_ be like him.

MJ and Ned texted him in a rush when he and May were heading out to get a late lunch after stopping by home to drop off the print.

They said that The Black Widow had just asked after him in front of their whole physics class. She’d apparently said that she’d missed him a few times lately and was sorry that she’d missed him again, but to pass on her good word.

Clint Barton had been on her heels, saying ‘aw, shortstuff. What happened to shortstuff?’ which was pretty typical Clint.

Peter figured Matt would give him the whole gossip soon enough.

MJ said everyone in class was star struck and painfully jealous of him.

She said that they hadn’t seen Mr. Stark yet, but not to worry, she had big plans to guilt trip him for his crimes against all that was Peter and holy.

Ned concurred.

Peter loved them so much but repeated the line that that wasn’t necessary. He was having an amazing day, actually. He needed no consolation. Or superheroes for that matter.

There was a whole world outside of them, brimming with heroes and things to learn. And they were great. And Peter felt whole in their presence.

It wasn’t the right field trip for him, the one that those guys were on. And that was okay; he’d gotten one just as good in the end.

**Author's Note:**

> Here is a link to the image Peter is discussing: https://thejewishmuseum.org/collection/31314-girl-on-a-swing-pitt-street-new-york


End file.
